Tag Archives: Hassan al-Banna

Interfaith Event Teaches That U.S. Is ‘Aiding’ Oppression

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mpacBy Ryan Mauro:

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) returned to All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California on May 5 to address the topic of radicalization in the wake of the Boston bombings. The church leader said there is a “crisis” of “Islamophobia” in America. MPAC denounced violence but said terrorism is a response to the U.S. “aiding and abetting oppression” at the behest of the military-industrial complex.

At the May 5 event, church leader Rev. Ed Bacon said that he “literally had my life changed and my thinking changed because of these two leaders,” referring to MPAC leaders Maher Hathout and Salam al-Marayati. He went so far as to say that the Islamic Center of Southern California, where Hathout is a spokesman and Muslim Brotherhood texts are used, is “my mosque.”

At the event, both MPAC leaders denounced terrorism and said Muslims must provide a counter-narrative to the violent themes that radicalize. Hathout said that too many Muslims are “soft” in confronting the radical ideas and have a “gang” mentality where they automatically side with other Muslims against non-Muslims.

However, Hathout said America is run by an elite minority beholden to lobbyists. He said that American democracy is threatened by “Islamophobia”  driven by supremacists who believe “the other” doesn’t deserve equal rights.

Al-Marayati rightly pointed out that there is an ideological struggle and reform in Islamic teaching is needed, but attributed the conflict to anger over the aggression of America and its allies.

“When a superpower is aiding and abetting oppression and there are grievances, and people react in a violent way, they [Americans] look at the violence and they say it is not time to deal with the grievances,” he said.

He claimed that there is a “cottage industry” of anti-Muslim activists that is part of a “larger machine,” including the military-industrial complex and special interests. These conspirators “want more contracts for more weapons to countries that only use these weapons against their own people or against civilians.”

MPAC held its last annual conference at this church, where Reverend Ed Bacon denounced “evangelical Zionism” as an evil on par with slavery. The church and MPAC held a press conference to declare their critics “right-wing extremists” who are “hateful.”

The critics noted that MPAC was founded by Muslim Brotherhood ideologues, including Senior Adviser Maher Hathout’s brother who was a “close disciple” of the group’s founder, Hassan al-Banna. Maher Hathout says he remains “very proud” of his time in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, but emphasizes it was 60 years ago. His brother said they came to the U.S. to spread the “Islamic Movement” of al-Banna.

After coming to America, one or both of the Hathout brothers was connected to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, as a 1989 document shows. MPAC has maintained a close alliance with U.S. Brotherhood entities ever since. In 1997, Maher Hathout promoted Hassan al-Banna as one of the “reformists,” along with other Islamists like Rachid al-Ghannouchi, who MPAC still hosts. In 1998 and 1999, he and al-Marayati legitimized Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli soldiers.

In 2000, Hathout said a “general intifada” would overthrow Arab governments guilty of “treason” for not confronting the “butchers” of Israel. Around this time, MPAC started becoming more conscious of the language it was using. Hathout said he regretted the “harshness of my remarks” when they received negative attention, but not the message. Tellingly, a radical named Mahdi Bray continued to serve as MPAC’s Political Director.

Read more at Front Page

The Art of Death

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pic_giant_050513_The-Art-of-DeathBy Andrew C. McCarthy:

Hassan al-Banna, the Muslim Brotherhood’s epigrammatic founder, was never at a loss for the chilling turn of phrase. His rally cry, the Brotherhood’s signature pledge that “Jihad is our way” and “Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope,” is the soundtrack of the “Arab Spring.” It speaks for a region over two-thirds of whose putative liberty lovers prefer to kill apostates than to abide freedom of conscience. Their embrace of the very sharia chauvinism that ties together Banna, bin Laden, the Saudi royals, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev explodes the Western myth of the moderate Muslim majority.

Yet the United States government clings to the myth. Even as Boston buries its dead, just as they must do from Cairo to Thailand, Americans are instructed not to notice the inevitable progression from Islamic-supremacist ideology to aggression and murder. The See No Islam campaign entails such inanities as portrayal of the Brotherhood as a “largely secular” outfit. Thus, few of us have heard of Banna’s odes to “the art of death.” To know them is to see the farce in President Obama’s sudden angst over hunger-striking jihadists, and in the renewed vigor of his quest to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

About 166 detainees remain at Gitmo. Around 100 of them have joined in a hunger strike that began four months ago when some of the jihadists accused their military guards of mishandling Korans — sorry, I mean Holy Korans — during searches of their cells.

Mind you, cells are regularly searched in every prison. Gitmo is unusual only in the heightened necessity of this routine. Jihadistsfrequently attack the guards with weapons improvised and hidden in their cells. The Holy Koran, meanwhile, is not wholly Koran — jihadists often use it to pass each other messages. No surprise there: Islamic supremacists take the book to command war against infidels — under the crazy notion that scores of verses like Sura 8:12, Allah’s command to “strike off [the unbelievers’] heads and strike off every fingertip of them” in order to “cast terror into [their] hearts,” actually mean what they say.

Alas, as we’ve seen before, the Pentagon brass — the guys who see jihadist mass murder at a U.S. military base as “workplace violence” — would sooner repeal the First Amendment than abide any mishandling of the Holy Koran. Indeed, Gitmo protocols have long directed that, where possible, only white-gloved Muslim military personnel should touch the sacred text, even when cells are being tossed. The Defense Department has thus internalized the supremacist principle that infidels are not fit to touch things Islamic, the very principle by which our friends the Saudis forbid public professions of Christianity and ban non-Muslims from entering the cities of Mecca and Medina.

While we avert our eyes from the ugliness of our enemies’ ideology, they go to school on us. Guerilla training for jihadists prominently includes propaganda. Much of this, naturally, is geared to rally the Left’s assorted shock troops of Western self-loathing. In equal part, though, it is theater. A good hunger strike works wonders. Like all real jihad, it is what Banna famously called “the art of death.” The omnipresent specter of martyrdom, he knew, was a transformative agent of influence.

Read more at National Review

ISNA Longs to Replace Spain with Islamic ‘Andalusia’

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ISNA's article about Andalucia

ISNA’s article about Andalucia

The Muslim Brotherhood and their U.S. groups are not hiding the fact that they are committed to resurrecting the caliphate.

By Ryan Mauro:

Islamists long for the days of when Spain was under an Islamic state called Andalusia. The Muslim Brotherhood’s founder preached that Spain must return to the House of Islam. The Islamic Society of North America, a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity, printed a recent article referring to Andalusia as a “paradise” that will return when “the only victor is Allah.”

“Thus Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, the Italian coast, as well as the islands of the Mediterranean, are all of them Muslim Mediterranean colonies and they must return to the Islamic fold … [The Roman Empire] was founded on cupidity and lust. It is thus our duty to rebuild the Islamic Empire …,” said Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna.

The U.S. Muslim Brotherhood listed the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) first among “our organizations and the organizations of our friends” in a 1991 document. The U.S. government likewise labeled it a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity when it designated ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation. Yet, a top White House official recently said ISNA is “his primary means of outreach to the American Muslim community.”

The reverence for Andalusia is on display in the March-April issue of ISNA’s magazine, Islamic Horizons. It includes an article titled, “Andalucia: Paradise Still Lost?” Underneath the title, it is stated, “Muslims in Spain retrieve some of their past status through better outreach.”

The article exalts Andalusia and inspires readers to believe that it can be brought back. The author closes the article by talking about Muslims like a cleric in Spain “who are the hope to making the motto [‘the only victor is Allah’] come true.”

When Islamists talk fondly of Andalusia, they are talking fondly of an Islamic state. The Cordoba Initiative, the group behind the “Ground Zero Mosque” project, named itself after the capital of an Islamic caliphate in Andalusia. Cordoba was shown a pristine example of religious coexistence and just rule.

Read more at The Clarion Project

History of the Muslim Brotherhood Penetration of the U.S. Government

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20110630_gmbdrmedium (1)by Clare M. Lopez:

Given the long history of Muslim Brotherhood activity in this country, its declared objective to “destroy the Western civilization from within,” and the extensive evidence of successful influence operations at the highest levels of the U.S. government, it is urgent that we recognize this clear and present danger that threatens not only our Republic but the values of Western civilization.

“Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.”

– Motto of the Muslim Brotherhood

The upheavals of 2011-2012 across the Middle East and North Africa swept aside secular rulers and the established political order with startling speed, and continue to focus world attention on the revolutionary forces driving these far-reaching events. Poverty, oppression, inequality, and lack of individual freedom are all hallmarks of the societal stagnation that has gripped the Islamic world for the better part of fourteen centuries, but the driving force of the so-called “Arab Spring” is a resurgent Islam, dominated by the forces of al-Qa’eda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Energized as Islam may be at this time, however, without the active involvement of the United States to help arm[1], fund[2], support[3], and train[4] the region’s Islamic rebels, it is questionable whether they could have gotten this far, this fast.

This report describes how the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated and suborned the U.S. government to actively assist, whether knowingly or not, the mission of its grand jihad. Its hard-won position at the forefront of the 21stcentury Islamic Awakening is possible only because of decades of patient infiltration and political indoctrination (Da’wa) in the West, and especially the United States of America, even as the grassroots work of building an organizational structure advanced steadily in the land of its origin as well. It is important to recognize the sophistication of the Brotherhood’s international strategy and how the takedown of U.S. national security defenses from within was critical to the current Middle East-North Africa (MENA) campaign to re-establish the Caliphate and enforce Islamic Law (shariah).

Origins of the Muslim Brotherhood

To understand the Brotherhood and how it operates, especially inside Western societies such as America’s, a brief overview of where it came from and why it was established is in order. Following the early years of blindingly fast military conquests, Islam began to falter as European Christendom doggedly kept pushing back, eventually surpassing an increasingly corrupt empire that had run out of lands to conquer, people to enslave, and riches to plunder. Yoked by consensus of the scholars (ijma) to an ideology that rejected critical thought, innovation, and scientific inquiry in favor of blind obedience to revelation, the Islamic world remained largely untouched by the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and eventual Industrial and Technological revolutions that catapulted the West to global power status.[5] Eventual European colonization of the Arab and Muslim world and the stunningly successful re-establishment of the Jewish nation in the modern State of Israel brought humiliation to people raised on tales of historical supremacism over these, its traditional dhimmi victims.

Aside from Israel, which came later, this was the world into which Hassan al-Banna was born in the early 20thcentury. An Egyptian Cairene, al-Banna seethed with frustration at Islam’s diminished status in the world; in particular he resented the presence and power of the British colonial administration in Egypt. The abolishment of the last Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in 1924 was perhaps the worst indignity, one that left al-Banna and his young Muslim university contemporaries apparently feeling unmoored. They joined together in 1928, determined (as we know from their statements and writing) to rectify things; “rectifying things,” for them, seems to have meant re-establishment of the Caliphate and global enforcement of Islamic Law (shariah). The organization they founded to return Egypt, the Middle East, and eventually the world to “proper” subservience to Islam as ordained by Allah would be the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Arabic).

Global Jihad

Since its inception in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood consistently has championed the cause of global jihad to “mobilize the entire Umma into one body to defend the right cause with all its strength…to jihad, to warfare…”[6]Until early 2011, its original bylaws could be found on the Brotherhood’s English language website, Ikhwanweb, established in 2005 by senior Brotherhood official Khairat al-Shater. Since then, they have been preserved by Steven Emerson at The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)[7]. Article (2) makes clear that the Brotherhood conceives of itself as “an international Muslim Body, which seeks to establish Allah’s law in the land by achieving the spiritual goals of Islam and the true religion…establishing the Islamic State” and “…building a new basis of human civilization as is ensured by the overall teachings of Islam.”[8]

In case that sounds relatively benign, Article (3) E gets more to the point: “The Islamic nation must be fully prepared to fight the tyrants and the enemies of Allah as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state.”[9] This is exactly what the Brotherhood did in Egypt in the violent years before and after the 1949 death of al-Banna, until it was forcibly suppressed, only to rise again in 2011-2012 when circumstances permitted.

The story of how those circumstances shifted to permit (even compel) the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power not only in Egypt, but also Libya, Tunisia, and perhaps soon, Syria and elsewhere, spans 20th century world history. World War II and the Brotherhood’s close alliance with Adolf Hitler and his genocidal antisemitic Nazis provided the perfect opportunity for Islam’s latest expansion into Europe, where dozens of Brotherhood branches were established. Upon the defeat of Nazi Germany, its clandestine networks of Muslim operatives were picked up by the western Allies and naively turned to the same purpose as the Nazis had pursued: to counter the influence of atheist communist Soviets.[10] So it was that Sa’id Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hasan al-Banna, and a delegation of Muslim Brothers, found themselves in the Oval Office on 23 September 1953 meeting with President Dwight D. Eisenhower.[11]

There is much more at Gatestone Institute

Clare M. Lopez, a strategic policy and intelligence expert, is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Clarion Fund. She was formerly a career operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

Twenty Years after the WTC Bombing

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20121001_WTC_attack_1993By Andrew C. McCarthy, February 26, 2013:

Today is the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing. It also marks three weeks since the attempted murder of Lars Hedegaard, the intrepid Danish champion of free speech. These events are not unrelated.

Back in 1993, there was a tireless effort to limn the WTC bombers as wanton killers. They were, we were to understand, bereft of any coherent belief system, unrepresentative of any mainstream construction of Islam. In reality, though, they were devout Muslim operatives who belonged to a jihadist cell formed in the New York area by Omar Abdel Rahman – whose notoriety as the shadowy “Blind Sheikh” obscured the basis of his profound influence over Islamists across the globe.

Sheikh Abdel Rahman is an internationally renowned Islamic jurist, having earned a doctorate in the jurisprudence of sharia – Islam’s societal framework and legal code - from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the center of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. Blind from early youth and plagued by several other maladies, Abdel Rahman was physically incapable of building a bomb, hijacking a jetliner, carrying out an assassination – in short, of performing any blood-soaked activity that would be useful to a terrorist organization . . . other than leading it.

It was nothing other than Abdel Rahman’s indisputable mastery of Islamic doctrine, and hence his capacity to give present-day vitality to a seventh-century summons to holy war, that vaulted him to the forefront of the jihad.

The World Trade Center bombing was Islamic supremacism’s declaration of war on the United States. It was a blunt statement by the savage shock troops of a worldwide movement that America – “the head of the snake,” as the Blind Sheikh called us – could be struck at home, right in the beating heart of economic liberty.

Despite serial atrocities, thousands of deaths, and a decade of war, we are today more willfully blind to the reason we were attacked than we were back in 1993 – back when our ignorance might have been excused by our homeland’s seeming invulnerability to the scourge of jihadist terror. Regardless of our reluctance to see it, mainstream Islam – the dynamic Islam of the Middle East, unadulterated by incentives to moderate, at least for a time, while settling in non-Muslim lands – is aggressively hegemonic. As proclaimed by another iconic supremacist, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated.”

And to dominate for a very specific reason. Supremacists are not the irrational savages we have been so desperate for two decades to portray them as. Whether the jihad terrorizes by explosives, suffocates by the systematic subjugation of women and persecution of religious minorities in Islamic countries, or infiltrates by stealthily using liberty to undermine liberty in the West, the mission is always coherent and always the same: the imposition of sharia.

The rationale of jihadist terror is to diminish our resolve to resist the gradual erosion of freedom and the relentless demands of Islamists – especially, Islamists of the Brotherhood variety. After the Blind Sheikhs and the bin Ladens have softened up the target, it is the Brothers who beguile us. Impeccably well-mannered and wearing neatly tailored suits, they flack for Hamas and maintain, straight-faced, that free speech is not so much a right to condemn their totalitarian ideology as a responsibility to suppress examination of it.

In that ideology, the implementation of classical sharia is the necessary precondition for Islamizing a society. Sharia is the architecture for a global caliphate. This is why Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood chieftain, promised that when elected he would birth a new constitution enshrining “the sharia, then the sharia, and finally the sharia” – a promise on which he has followed through. This is the utopia of all Islamists, be they terrorists, or faux moderates who proclaim their willingness to pursue totalitarian ends by “peaceful political” means, or the Muslim masses who celebrate 9/11 and vote Brotherhood parties into power.

We did not want to acknowledge the sharia logic of the terrorists 20 years ago. We were told then that Islam had nothing to do with attacks on the West incited by Muslim jurists citing Muslim scripture.

There is no selling that fairy tale today, not after thousands of Americans have lost their lives. So the lie has become more aggressive, like Islam itself. While poseurs such as John Brennan – President Obama’s counterterrorism czar and nominee for CIA director - distort the meaning of jihad, Islamists and their fellow travelers seek not merely to suppress by intimidation but to criminalize by law the objective examination of Islamic supremacism.
Read more: Family Security Matters 

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor  Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and blogs at National Review Online’s The Corner. 

 

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Muslim Brotherhood Setting Its Sights on the Monarchies

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Egyptians shown support for President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. (Photo: Reuters)

Egyptians shown support for President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. (Photo: Reuters)

by Clare M. Lopez:
Flush with successful power grab victories in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is now setting its sights on bringing down additional governments across the region. The years 2011-2012 were the years when secular rulers, including Tunisia’s Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak were ousted in a wave of al-Qa’eda and Muslim Brotherhood-led uprisings actively supported by the United States (U.S.) and Western European NATO members.Now, reports out of the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Kuwait (and elsewhere) indicate a surge of Brotherhood subversive activity that is raising alarm in monarchies concerned they could be the Brotherhood’s next targets. Continuing U.S. government support for this 85-year-old Islamic jihadist organization whose objectives are openly and militantly expansionist only adds to the concern and confusion of kingdoms perhaps sensing that long-term relationships of trust with the Americans may not be quite as solid as they once were.

In Abu Dhabi in mid-January 2013, prosecutors brought charges against a network of 94 Muslim Brotherhood members who allegedly sought to seize power through subversion. The UAE’s Attorney General Salim Saeed Kubaish described the goals of the accused Brothers in terms perfectly aligned with classic Ikhwan (Brotherhood) doctrine, as enunciated by founder Hassan al-Banna, theoretician Sayyed Qutb and current senior jurist, Yousef al-Qaradawi:

“The organisation … announced its declared principles as being the teaching and virtues of Islam, but their undeclared aims were, in fact, to seek to seize power and the state’s system of governance and to oppose the basic principles of this system.”

The prosecutors in the case would appear intimately familiar with the Bylaws of the Muslim Brotherhood, as first written by al-Banna in the early 20th century and displayed at its online website, the IkhwanWeb, until mysteriously scrubbed in 2011. As Article (3)D of the bylaws instructs, “Make every effort for the establishment of educational, social, economic and scientific institutions and the establishment of mosques, schools, clinics, shelters, clubs…” Obviously aware of the Brotherhood’s Modus Operandi, prosecutors in the UAE Brotherhood case

“…allege that the organsiation [sic] infiltrated societies, schools, universities, ministries and families under the pretence of doing social work to conceal their actions and “divert their loyalty to the organisation and its leadership after preparing a general climate in society to accept this by turning public opinion against all the authorities of the state”.

Unease about the long-term stability of the Jordanian monarchy likewise reflects the increasingly bold activism of the Muslim Brotherhood. As Jordan headed to general elections in mid-January 2013, the deputy leader of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood, Zaki Bani Rsheid, openly threatened King Abdullah’s government with “unrest and violence” while calling for an election boycott and street protests. Although Abdullah has been attempting to quell popular dissatisfaction by gradually introducing government reforms that devolve powers to the elected parliament, the Jordanian Brotherhood is riding a crest of confidence since, as Rsheid says, “We have come to power in Egypt and Tunisia.”

Similarly representative of the spreading concern about the Brotherhood’s ultimate aims for the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region is a late January 2013 update from Kuwait’s Arab Times that warns of cooperation between Muslim Brotherhood groups in Egypt and Kuwait.

While the accuracy of the report’s details cannot be verified, it is the tone of the allegations about Ikhwan Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie issuing instructions for Egyptian Brotherhood operatives to “support their colleagues in Kuwait” that hints at rising levels of alarm.

That alarm is hardly unrealistic. As Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser wrote in a hard-hitting January 28, 2013 article accusing the U.S. of “Arming Enemies in Egypt,” the U.S. “administration has at every step of the way facilitated the ascension of a political party in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, which lives and breathes anti-Westernism and anti-freedom policies.”

Jasser might have added that this is the same administration which issued a presidential intelligence finding and appointed an official liaison (Christopher Stevens) to support the Al-Qaeda-affiliated militias that ousted Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.

That’s the same administration which issued yet another presidential intelligence finding in 2012 as well as a special Treasury Department Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) waiver to authorize U.S. assistance for the Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated jihadist rebels in Syria.

Read more at Radicalislam.org

Clare Lopez is a senior fellow at RadicalIslam.org and a strategic policy and intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, national defense and counterterrorism. Lopez served for 20 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

See also:

What Does The Gang of Eight Know About The Gun Running From Libya To Syrian Jihadis? (counterjihadreport.com)

Will Egypt become a totalitarian state?

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by Robert R. Reilly

The Muslim Brotherhood has made another giant step forward in consolidating its rule in Egypt through the successful passage of the newly drafted constitution by some 64 percent of those who voted. Next come the parliamentary elections in two months through which the Brotherhood will regain control of the legislative branch. In the interim, it has stacked the upper house of Parliament, called the Shura Council, with its own members who will have the power to legislate until the new lower house is elected.

President Mohammed Morsi has already successfully decapitated and made peace with the powerful Egyptian military. The new constitution has given him the power to purge the Supreme Constitutional Court by reducing its size from 18 to 11 members. The president of the Lawyers’ Syndicate, Sameh Ashour, pointed out the goal: “These are monopolistic plans. The Brotherhood wants to control all aspects of the state.”

In other words, this will be a clean sweep.

Why worry? Isn’t Islamist democracy just a step on the way to democracy as it is understood in the West? Isn’t that why the United States is supporting Egypt, and why the US administration has courted the Muslim Brotherhood since President Barack Obama seated its members in the front row for his famous speech in Cairo in 2009? Isn’t this all part of the Arab spring?

The novelist Saul Bellow once wrote that, “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” To maintain the illusion that the Muslim Brotherhood is intent on transforming Egypt into a democracy requires the application of considerable ignorance. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in reaction to Kemal Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate in 1924. Its ultimate aim is to restore the caliphate. Its vehicle for doing so, according to founder Hassan al-Banna, is a one-party system akin to that of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Al-Banna envisaged a bottom-up strategy in which people would be Islamized at the local level first. For this purpose, he created his party. After winning the masses, the Muslim Brotherhood would take total control.

Why is total control necessary? The chief ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, wrote that, “Islam chose to unite earth and heaven in a single system.” What does this mean? It means that the separate realms of the divine and the human have collapsed into each other, and that it will now be possible, as Qutb said, “to abolish all injustice from the earth.”

This, of course, is a millenarian vision similar, in many ways, to the Marxist dream of creating a classless society based on the abolition of scarcity. If perfect justice is to be achieved here, rather than before God’s throne in the final judgment, several things will be required by those who institute it. They will, in fact, need the very same things that God is thought to possess in his ability to achieve perfect justice. Those two things are omnipotence and omniscience. The omnipotence will be gained through the establishment of a totalitarian regime. The omniscience will be obtained, as it always has been in totalitarian regimes, through an extensive secret police apparatus.

What does the Brotherhood’s version of Islam look like in this scheme? As indicated above, it does not look like a normal religion, which preserves the distinction between the earthly and the transcendent. It is a revolutionary ideology aimed at the total transformation of reality. Here is its view, as expressed by the de facto spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi: “Islam is a comprehensive school of thought, a creed, an ideology, and cannot be completely satisfied but by [completely] controlling society and directing all aspects of life, from how to enter the toilet to the construction of the state.”

However, some analysts suggest that, since its founding 84 years ago, the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved and, when in power, will evolve even more. This is always the hope of those who fail to recognize the essentially totalitarian nature of certain political movements and principles that are not subject to change. Similar hopes were expressed about the Nazi Party and various Marxist parties. They would mature in power, the exercise of which would transform them in a moderate direction. This, of course, did not happen, though these parties often fostered the impression that it was. Rather, these widely held illusions actually enabled these totalitarian parties to consolidate their power.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a hard-core cadre party. It takes eight years of training to become a full member. Let us listen to the Brotherhood’s leadership today concerning its mission and its prospects of changing. The Deputy Guide of the Brotherhood, Khairat al-Shater, said: “The mission is clear: restoring Islam and its all-encompassing conception; subjugating people to God; instituting the religion of God: the Islamization of life, empowering of God’s religion; establishing the Nahda of the Ummah [Muslim nation] on the basis of Islam.”

As for change, al-Shater proclaimed that, “no one can come and say: ‘let’s change the overall mission’… No one can say, ‘forget about obedience, discipline and structures’… No. All of these are constants that represent the fundamental framework for our method; the method of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is not open for developing or change.”

So, this is where Egypt is now headed. Some, such as Alber Saber, 27, who was accused of blasphemy this past fall, say of the Brotherhood, “They are no different from the former regime. The weapons have changed, but they are both oppressive regimes.” He might very well wish this were so, but it is common experience that authoritarian regimes are considerably more limited in their reach and cruelty than totalitarian regimes. They wish to maintain power, but do not have the metaphysical ambition of transforming reality. This, in other words, will be worse than Mubarak.

Read the rest at IPT

Robert R. Reilly is a member of the board of the Middle East Media Research Institute and the author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind.

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Meet Al Jazeera’s Holocaust-Denying Televangelist…Is This What We Can Expect on the New Current TV?

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stop al JazeeraBy

By now many have heard about Al Jazera’s recent acquisition of Current TV, Al Gore’s floundering television network that has, since its inception in 2005, displayed not only abysmal ratings but also blatant anti-Israel and anti-U.S. bias.

Ironically, The Blaze sought to purchase Current, but was rebuffed by its executives who stated that they could not in good conscience sell out to a network whose point of view was not aligned with theirs. Thus, the only reasonable step for Gore and company was to seal a multi-million dollar deal with Al Jazeera, because, according to Current co-founder Joel Hyatt, the Qatar-based network “was founded with the same goals we had for Current.”

So what, exactly, are those shared goals and values? And what might a revamped Al Jazeera-led lineup at the new (and likely not so improved) Current TV look like?

A glimpse at Al Jazeera’s highest-rated program to date might give us an inkling into what lies ahead and it is cringe-inducing (though not surprising) to say the least.

Current: Meet Muslim Brotherhood spiritual sherpa and Al Jazeera’s top performing Islamic televangelist Youssef al-Qaradawi, best known for repeatedly twisting the Holocaust into a mold that suits his Islamic agenda and for declaring that his greatest hope is simply to live long enough to “shoot dead Allah’s enemies, the Jews.” The prolific imam has also issued hundreds of fatwas on everything from homosexuality to music to the role of female suicide bombers in their noble pursuit of jihad.

In light of Hyatt’s disturbing statement concerning his network’s shared goals with Al Jazeera, it is perhaps prudent to review the latter’s star talent, who has graced the homes of some 60 million viewers for the past 15 years with his weekly program ”Shariah and Life.”

 Qaradawi 3Qaradawi’s Anti-Semitism

Returning to Qaradawi’s long-harbored desire to live long enough so that Allah might grant him the singular opportunity of personally slaying Jewish people, the imam stated during a televised speech:

“I’d like to say that the only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of Jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom. Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds. Allah’s mercy and blessings upon you.”

According to Qaradawi, for their inherent ”evil,” Allah imposed upon the Jews a series of “punishments,” the last one led by Adolf Hitler “by means of all the things he did to them.”

“He [Hitler] managed to put them in their place.”

“This [the Holocaust] was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers,” Qaradawi stated proudly during a televised broadcast in 2009.

The imam openly praised the fuhrer for teaching the Jews “a divine lesson” while in the same breath minimizing the Holocaust by saying that the Jewish people have “exaggerated the issue.”

So, the imam uses the Shoah in a way that suits him, in a way that furthers his agenda, while at the same time denying the true extent of the carnage lest he engender any “undue” sympathy for the Jewish people.

Anti-Semitic diatribes such as the one featured above are just a small taste of what Qaradawi has offered on his weekly Sunday broadcasts.

So who is Qaradawi?

According to lore, Qaradawi is no ordinary imam or mufti, having allegedly memorized the entire Quran by age 10. He was born in Egypt in 1926, graduated from Al Azhar University in Cairo and by 1942 joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfather of all major militant Islamic groups including Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda.

The imam was arrested several times for the activities he carried out while with the Brotherhood and subsequently fled to Qatar in 1961, where he still resides. He has become the preeminent Muslim (or at least Sunni) “authority” on all things Islam, covering a range of topics from “mother’s milk banks” to the right of every Palestinian woman to offer herself up as a suicide-bombing martyr.

Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood

Qaradawi’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood stem back to his days as a student at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he met Brotherhood-founder (and not coincidentally, Hitler admirer) Hassan al-Banna. Banna was perhaps the first to offer Qaradawi a glimpse into alternative views on the handling of societies ills and “perversions.”

Despite living in exile in Qatar — something that is more than likely to change now that his progeny,

Mohammed Morsi is at the helm in Egypt — Qaradawi has the Brotherhood leader’s ear, acting as his key spiritual adviser. While the imam turned down an official position with the Brotherhood, allegedly because he felt his true calling was to evangelize Islam, he still greatly influences the grandfather of all jihadist groups to this day, and in no small way.

Consider that as recently as 2010 Morsi viciously referred to Israeli Jews as “blood-suckers” and  ”descendants of apes and pigs,” invoking age-old anti-Semitic slurs. Here, we see Hitler’s influence via al Banna and later, Qaradawi, weaving its web of hate and vitriol over today’s Islamic leaders.

Morsi called on Muslims “outside Palestine” to “support the resistance fighters and besiege the Zionist wherever they are.”

“None of the Arab or Muslim peoples and regimes should have dealings with them,” the Egyptian president went on to state. “Pressure should be exerted upon them. They must not be given any opportunity, and must not stand on any Arab or Islamic land. They must be driven out of our countries.”

So how does Qaradawi’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood relate to Al Jazeera and now by default, Current TV? According to David Reaboi, vice president for strategic communications at the Center for Security Policy, both network’s programing have shown some rather specific parallels concerning the Muslim Brotherhood from as early as the onset of the Arab Spring. In a statement to TheBlaze, Reaboi, noted that both Current and Al Jazeera, “presented the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover in Egypt as a democratic revolution.”

“Both networks pushed provably false narratives about the future of Egypt’s ‘democracy,’ it’s ideological makeup, and demonized those that correctly assessed the situation,” he continued.

“Qaradawi’s role in mobilizing public and nation-state support for the Islamic ascendancy, from Tunisia through Egypt, Libya, Syria and beyond, cannot be overstated. When Qaradawi declared Gadhafi and Assad ‘unIslamic,’ it was not just his estimated 60 million viewers that got the message.”

Reaboi added that Qaradawi’s fatwa indeed helped inform the Obama administration in its calculation about views from the “Arab Street” on such issues. Thus, the imam’s influence is indeed far-reaching and has the power to effect change in a negative way.

Read more at the Blaze

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Muslim Brotherhood “Machinations”, Or Vox Populi?

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Egyptian Liberals (like their Egyptian-American expatriate colleague Mona Eltahawy) championing free speech

Egyptian Liberals (like their Egyptian-American expatriate colleague Mona Eltahawy) championing free speech

by Andrew Bostom

Vote Compass is an interactive electoral literacy application, originally founded by Clifton van der Linden, at the University of Toronto, and subsequently applied internationally by political scientists, including within Egypt.

Dutch Political Scientist André Krouwel, working with an academic team of Egyptian political scientists at Vote Compass Egypt, was interviewed for a story published today (12/8/12) in the Vancouver Sun (hat tip Diana West) about data on Egyptian attitudes toward the draft constitution. Despite Egypt’s ongoing political crisis, including violent clashes, precipitated by President Morsi’s assertion of executive powers to break the 6-month deadlock which had stalled Egypt’s constitutional draft and referendum process, Krouwel (ostensibly speaking for his Vote Compass Egypt team) acknowledges,

About 70 per cent of the population will vote in favor of the constitution

This overwhelming support for the draft constitution was registered despite the fact that as my colleague Andrew McCarthy re-affirms today (12/8/12), the charter effectively, “denies freedom of conscience,” and “denies freedom of expression.”

Dating back to within a few days of their publication in April, 2007, I have repeatedly highlighted data from Egypt indicating that 74% of Egyptians favored “strict” application of the Sharia in general. As recently as December 2010, Pew polling data revealed that 84% of Egyptian Muslims rejected freedom of conscience in the most ugly terms claiming apostates should be killed (i.e., that percentage would likely be well over 90% if less draconian punishments, such as imprisonment and beating till recantation were queried), 82% favor stoning adulterers to death, and 77% approved of mutilating punishments for theft. Moreover, just last week when 7 expatriate Copts and Terry Jones were condemned to death for “blasphemy” not a single high profile Egyptian  “liberal” or “non-Islamist,” or “authentic moderate reformer”—whatever moniker one wishes to use for such individuals—has forcefully and unequivocally condemned this heinous verdict in the Egyptian public square.

None of this bedrock, totalitarian, liberty-crushing mass Islamic mindset can be blamed on the behind the scenes “machinations of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)”; it is merely a reflection of Islamic beliefs and  mores the MB openly shares with the mass of Egyptians, and has shared since the undercurrent of public longings in the 1920s first lead to the MB’s flowering.

Islamologist James Heyworth-Dunne’s observations, published shortly after his death in 1949, made clear that “…should the ikhwan [Brotherhood] acquire power,” it would impose the orthodox Islamic, Sharia-based restrictions advocated by founder Hasan al-Banna (i.e., such as the compulsory veiling of women; closing “un-Islamic” newspapers and periodicals, and making impossible the purchase of English and French novels; closing bars, restaurants, and cabarets, while forbidding the sale or consumption of alcohol and scourging anyone found consuming alcoholic beverages).  However, Heyworth-Dunne added that these restrictions merely represented a “…return to their Islamic customs which, in fact prevailed only 25 years ago.”Thus Heyworth-Dunne (writing prior to1950) confirms that before 1925 (or earlier, i.e., “25 years ago”)—antedating by at least three years the advent of the MB—their “version” of Sharia and its mores represented in fact a recent, previously longstanding status quo

History and hard data—including the Vote Compass Egypt data just shared by Krouwel revealing 70% support for the increasingly Sharia-compliant Egyptian draft constitution, tell us why the “Egyptian liberals” are so afraid of a constitutional referendum despite their claims it is “unpopular”.

Now that the “Egyptian liberals” have organized into a front they should be able to defeat the proposed constitution, and force a new draft process. But the “liberals’” response seems to be violent anarchy instead—which of course likely serves the MB because the MB bureaucrats may have softened, but their ardent followers of all stripes surely haven’t become less adept at violence.

The sheer, delusive hypocrisy of the “Egyptian liberals” is epitomized by Kamel Daoud, spokesman for Hizb-el Dostour, (the Constitutional Party), led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed El-Baradei. Crowing that the opposition was “winning a new round every day,” and “I think more and more people understand why we are against what is happening,”  he nonetheless re-stated his movement’s bottom line rejection of a simple democratic referendum that would validate his contentions:

We continue to insist that there should not be a vote on the constitution.

Exposed Islamist Group Scrambles

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Picture-32 By Ryan Mauro

The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) held a press conference on December 6 about “right-wing extremists” in response to my article originally published here criticizing the All Saints Episcopal Church of Pasadena for hosting its convention. MPAC founder and senior adviser Maher Hathout admitted to having been a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but said the relationship ended when he moved to the U.S. and he is on the side of the Egyptian opposition to Mohammed Morsi.

The press conference’s speakers relentlessly bashed the raising of legitimate concerns about MPAC as “Islamophobia,” hate-mongering and bigotry. The Center for American Progress report “Fear Inc: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” was made available for attendees. Rector Ed Bacon said the church received dozens of hate-filled emails, resulting in sympathetic media coverage.

“Kudos to All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena and MPAC for the promotional savvy to exploit a handful of negative emails into a major media story showcasing their supposed victimhood,” said Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which sponsored the original article. His organization was the only one directly attacked in the press conference.

Maher Hathout said that he is “very proud” of his work with the Muslim Brotherhood “student movement” against the Nazis and British, but never dealt with any organization outside the U.S. since coming to the country about 40 years ago. In our debate the day prior, MPAC President Salam Al-Marayati repeatedly slammed mentions of a Brotherhood connection to his group as “lies” rooted in hatred. When I challenged MPAC to take an active stand against the Brotherhood, Al-Marayati said it was a “ridiculous suggestion” and “it’s not worth our time.”

Hathout said that he is against the anti-democratic “trend” in Egypt and is on the side of the opposition.  He still took a soft view of the Brotherhood, saying its “work is changing” and its critics “freeze a point in history and think this is the whole story.”

MPAC was created to advance the Brotherhood ideology. The late Hassan Hathout, former MPAC President and Maher’s brother, said that they came to the U.S. to start the “Islamic Movement” inspired by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Brotherhood. He described himself as a “close disciple” of al-Banna. A 1989 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood Financial Committee document talks about working with someone named Hathout “in the field,” demonstrating that the Brotherhood had ties to at least one of the Hathout brothers after they arrived. MPAC has long collaborated with known U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities, as identified in the Brotherhood’s own documents, FBI investigators and the federal government during the trial of the Holy Land Foundation.

The privately expressed views of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood match the publicly expressed views of Hassan Hathout. A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood document says, “its work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within.” In 1997, Hathout said the U.S. needs the “Islamic Movement” because “If you look objectively you will see that this current civilization harbors in its body the seeds of its own destruction.”

Maher Hathout says he did not continue working with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood after he came to the U.S., but the Brotherhood is more than a political party. It is a movement based on Islamist ideology. In 1997, he praised Hassan al-Banna and two other Brotherhood-allied Islamists, Rashid Ghannouchi and Hasan al-Turabi, as “reformists.” Remember that when MPAC boasts that it is a voice of “reform.” Ghannouchi spoke at an MPAC event in 2011. Hathout is the spokesman for the Islamic Center of Southern California, which still suggests Brotherhood texts on Islamic law on its website.

A 2004 investigation into the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood by the Chicago Tribune makes this point. An official with the Muslim American Society admitted that it was created by the Muslim Brotherhood, but explained that it “went way beyond that point of conception.” It is not administrated by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood but it follows its teachings. “We are not your typical Ikhwan [Brotherhood],” he explained.

This Islamist influence is apparent in MPAC’s history. In 1998, Maher Hathout said of Hezbollah: “I disagree with them on other issues, but on the issue of fighting to liberate their land and attacking only armed forces, this is legitimate, that is an American value — freedom and liberty.” In 1999, Salam al-Marayati said Hezbollah engages in “legitimate resistance.”

Read more at Front Page

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